Sun Poem

The son of an Eritrean father and a Russian mother, British composer Daniel Kidane writes music inspired by an exciting variety of sonic sources and cultural questions. He has described the musical environment of his childhood as consisting of “Russian orthodox choral [music], Soviet war songs, Perestroika pop, classical orchestral, Eritrean folk, and UK Jungle” and his considerable oeuvre is similarly multifaceted, including works for orchestra, voice, chamber ensemble, string quartet, and even electric guitar. 

Kidane’s pieces often develop a single theme — his string quartet Foreign Tongues imagines different languages spoken simultaneously, while Sirens, written in collaboration with Zimbabwean poet Zodwa Nyoni, offers a musical tableau of a night out in Manchester. A champion for diversity and equity in classical music, Kidane has written many works that critically engage with social and political events, such as Be Still, written during the COVID-19 lockdown, and Woke, which opened the BBC Proms in 2019. 

Kidane’s Sun Poem is a journey of fatherhood. Composed in the wake of two momentous paternal events — losing his father to cancer and becoming a first-time father himself — Kidane took the title from the second part of Barbadian author Kamau Brathwaite’s epic trilogy. Sun Poem is a complement to the work’s female-dominated first part, called Mother Poem, and explores the history of Barbados from a male perspective as it is passed down from grandfather to father to son. Inspired by Brathwaite, Kidane’s Sun Poem engages with ideas of maturation and manhood, familial bonds, and cultural inheritance. “There is no way I couldn’t have written it,” Kidane stated in an interview. “Sun Poem is a memento for my son.” 

Like a timeless family heirloom, Sun Poem takes one musical idea on a transcendent journey. Beginning in fits and starts, the work opens with the call of muted trumpets. The instruments’ layered entries sound a frustrated emergence around a solitary, repeated pitch. Winds and other brass, alongside plucked strings and piano, enter as if the senses are awakening throughout the ensemble. A four-note motive, consisting of two consecutive upward leaps, appears for the first time in the trumpet. As the orchestra becomes more animated, a variety of taut rhythmic gestures typical of Kidane’s music are repeated, suggesting a child’s uncertain but excited first steps. The wide and colorful range of percussion exudes possibility as well as risk. 

Following a grand pause, the woodwinds and trumpet offer a fully matured theme, supported by sustained harmonies in the strings. As it accumulates momentum, the theme encounters various obstacles — harmonic, timbral, and metric. Heralded by the opening’s aspiring leaps in the flute, the work’s apex features a triumphant brass melody scored over pulsating strings that evoke the minimalism of John Adams’s Short Ride in a Fast Machine — an apt metaphor for life. Yet the entrance of a reflective wandering melody in the clarinet curbs this unbounded striving and the music begins to retreat from the heights it has just attained. The periodic intrusion of low brass hints at something ominous, though it is tempered by the brightness of the percussion and piano. 

A final, deliberate iteration of the four-note motive appears softly in the high strings, and the opening flutter of the trumpet sounds once again — one life cycle completing as another begins. 

— Leah Batstone 

Leah Batstone is a musicologist and visiting scholar at the Jordan Center at New York University. She is also the founder and creative director of the Ukrainian Contemporary Music Festival, which takes place each spring in New York City.